Simpson, Ella ORCID: 0000-0001-5561-4606 (2022) ‘In on the outside’: the stories of creative writing practitioners working in prisons and their role in the desistance journey. Basingstoke . Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke. (In Press)

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Abstract

Despite a long history of the arts and literature behind the prison walls there has been little academic research on the role of the professional creative practitioners who deliver a proportion of this work with prisoners, even more so in the case of creative writing activities. Where research has been conducted it has tended to mute the authentic voices of these practitioners, prioritising evaluation over experience, quantification over qualia. This book addresses the gap in the literature. Using an innovative, creative data collection tool to elicit the authentic autobiographical stories of 19 creative writing practitioners working in prison, exploring their ambitions, motivations and journeys into jail. It priorities the voices of practitioners over those of the researcher and in doing so proposes a new methodological approach. It is one that combines narrative criminology’s attention to the power of stories to shape reality with the rigour of narratology, a linguistic ‘science’ offering robust tools to better understand the constitutive abilities of narrative. The resulting analysis presents important implications for understanding of the desistance process in terms of relational dynamics (between prisoner and practitioner) and the narrative dimensions of desistance, including the identification of specific narrative mechanisms which may play a role in creative writing interventions in criminal justice contexts.

More widely, the findings provide a challenge to conventional notions of a benevolent, class-based penal voluntary sector distributing patronage to the less fortunate. Instead suggesting an ethos of mutual aid in which practitioners and prisoners share commonalities and some degree of equivalence in their journeys. This in turn has implications for understanding the place of the penal voluntary sector within the prison system and the tensions between the two.

Item Type:	Book
Uncontrolled Keywords:	narrative criminology; prisons; creative arts; desistance
Subjects:	K Law > K Law (General)
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Law & Criminology (LAC)
Last Modified:	09 Feb 2024 13:23
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/42036

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